Move over Blu-ray, the Archival Disc is here

Sony and Panasonic have announced the formulated "Archived Disc", the fruit of their joint labours to create a new generation of optical discs for digital storage.

The partnership between the two companies was announced in July last year, with the aim first and foremost of creating a professional-use disc for archiving purposes. While all the signs suggest we are moving away from physical data storage towards cloud services, Sony and Panasonic clearly believe there is still room for growth in the optical disc market.

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The same is true of media storage. Many people now eschew the ownership of music and video in physical format, but storing high-quality media that takes up masses of gigabytes can be problematic. This explains the enduring appeal of Blu-ray discs amid the demise of other optical disc formats. Blu-ray discs generally offer around 50GB of storage (occasionally 100GB) in order to support HD quality video. Sony and Panasonic evidently have their eyes fixed on a high-capacity successor to Blu-ray given the inevitable proliferation and increasing availability of 4K (or Ultra HD) content.

The early agreement signalled that the disc would have a recording capacity of at least 300GB, but along with today's announcement, the companies have released a roadmap that sees them aiming for a capacity of 1TB over time, by way of a 500GB iteration.

The early 300GB version of the disc will be equipped with basic crosstalk cancellation to achieve high-quality playback as part of its signal processing technology. The 500GB disc will have additional cancellation capabilities and Sony and Panasonic expect that by the time the 1TB disc is released it will also be equipped with multi-level recording tech, which allows for greater storage capacity with no loss of quality.

In the press release issued by Sony, the company lists a range of factors that make optical discs ideal for long-term data storage. Discs possess properties to help protect themselves against the environment, including coverings that make them resistant to dust and water, as well as allowing them to endure changes in temperature and humidity. When kept in good conditions, it is believed that CDs and DVDs can last for up to 100 years -- although this obviously has yet to be proven.

Another factor in the optical disk's favour as a long-term storage format is inter-generational compatibility, which means they can continue to be read as technology evolves. Despite all the odds, it seems that thanks to backwards-compatibility and our ever-increasing appetite for higher-quality content, there's life in the old disc yet.